Major Arcana
, but with the author's graphic style.]] The Major Arcana is the name given by occultists to the picture cards of a 78-card tarot deck.Dummett, Michael, Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis. A Wicked Pack of Cards, Bloomsbury (1996), p. 38 These cards which, in those decks also used for Tarot card games serve as a permanent trumps, are distinguished from the remaining cards, which are known by occultists as the Minor Arcana.Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, History of the Occult Tarot, London: Duckworth, 2002 The terms "Major" and "Minor Arcana" are used in the occult and divinatory applications of the deck (not by card players) and originate with Jean-Baptiste Pitois, writing under the name Paul Christian.Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett. A Wicked Pack of Cards. The Origins of the Occult Tarot. New York. St. Martin's Press, 1996 Michael Dummett writes that the Major Arcana originally had simple allegorical or exoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it was invented.Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1980. The occult significance only began to emerge in the 18th century when Antoine Court de Gébelin (a Swiss clergyman and Freemason) published Le Monde Primitif. The construction of the occult and divinatory significance of the tarot, and the Major and Minor Arcana, continued on from there.See Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot for a detailed history of the construction of the occult tarot. For example, Court de Gébelin argued for the Egyptian, kabbalistic, and divine significance of the tarot trumps: Etteilla created a method of divination using tarot: Eliphas Lévi worked hard to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the tarot de Marsailles, creating a "tortuous" kabbalastic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life. The Marquis Stanislas de Guaita established the Major Arcana as an initiatory sequence to be used to establish a path of spiritual ascension and evolution. Finally Sallie Nichols, a Jungian psychologist, wrote up the tarot as having deep psychological and archetypal significance, even encoding the entire process of Jungian individuation into the tarot trumps.Sallie Nichols. Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. San Francisco: Weiser Books, 1980. . These various interpretations of the Major Arcana developed in stages, all of which continue to exert significant influence on practitioners' explanations of the Major Arcana to this day. List of the Major Arcana Each Major Arcanum depicts a scene, mostly featuring a person or several people, with many symbolic elements. In many decks, each has a number (usually in Roman numerals) and a name, though not all decks have both, and some have only a picture. The earliest decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on the Majors (probably because a great many of the people using them at the time were illiterate), and the order of cards was not standardized. Nevertheless, one of the most common sets of names and numbers is as follows: Strength is traditionally the eleventh card and Justice the eighth, but the influential Rider-Waite-Smith deck switched the position of these two cards in order to make them a better fit with the astrological correspondences worked out by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, under which the eighth card is associated with Leo and the eleventh with Libra. Today many decks use this numbering, particularly in the English-speaking world. Both placements are considered valid. Prior to the 17th century, the trumps were simply part of a special card deck used for gaming and gambling. There may have been allegorical and cultural significance attached to them, but beyond that, the trumps originally had little mystical or magical import. Esotericism In the hands of Freemasons, Protestant clerics, and the nobility of the day, the tarot became a "bible of bibles", an esoteric repository of all the significant truths of creation. The trend was started by prominent freemason and Protestant cleric Antoine Court de Gébelin who suggested that the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin, and mystic divine and kabbalastic significance. A contemporary of his, the Comte de Mellet, added to Court de Gébelin's claims by suggesting (attacked as being erroneous) that the tarot was associated with Gypsies and was in fact the imprinted book of Hermes Trismegistus. These claims were continued by Etteilla. Etteilla is primarily recognized as the founder and propagator of the divinatory tarot, but he also participated in the propagation of the occult tarot by claiming the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin and was an account of the creation of the world and a book of eternal medicine. Éliphas Lévi revitalized the occult tarot by associating it with the mystical Kabbalah and making it a "prime ingredient in magical lore".Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett. A Wicked Pack of Cards. The Origins of the Occult Tarot. New York. St. Martin's Press, 1996. pp. 174 As Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett note, "it is to him (Lévi) that we owe its (the Tarot's) widespread acceptance as a means of discovering hidden truths and as a document of the occult... Lévi's writings formed the channel through which the Western tradition of magic flowed down to modern times." As the following quote by P. D. Ouspensky shows, the association of the tarot with Hermetic, kabbalastic, magical mysteries continued at least to the early 20th century. Claims such as those initiated by early freemasons today find their way into academic discourse. Semetsky,Inna Semetsky. Re-symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic. (2011) Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. for example, explains that tarot makes it possible to mediate between humanity and the godhead, or between god/spirit/consciousness and profane human existence. NicholsonChristina Nicholson. How to Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Irigaray, Alicer, and Neo-Pagan Negotiation of the Otherworld. Feminist Theology, 2003. 11: 362-74. uses the tarot to illustrate the deep wisdom of feminist theology. SantarcangeliSantarcangeli, Paolo (1979). The Jester and the Madman, Heralds of Liberty and Truth. Diogenes 27: 28-40. informs us of the wisdom of the fool and Nichols speaks about the archetypal power of individuation boiling beneath the powerful surface of the tarot archetypes. Fortune telling In the popular mind, tarot is indelibly associated with divination, fortune telling, or cartomancy. Tarot was not invented as a mystical or magical tool of divination. The association of the tarot with cartomantic practice is coincident with its uptake by Freemasons as a fountain of eternal, divine wisdom.There is recent evidence that the tarot may have been associated with divination early, perhaps as early at the 15th century in Bologna. See Franco Pratesi. Tarot in Bologna: Documents from the University Library. The Playing-Card, Vol. XVII, No. 4. pp. 136–146. http://trionfi.com/pratesi-cartomancer Indeed, it was the very same people publishing esoteric commentary of the magical, mystery tarot (e.g. Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet) that also published commentary on the divinatory tarot. Be that as it may, there is a distinct line of development of the cartomantic tarot that occurs in parallel with the imposition of hermetic mysteries on the formerly mundane pack of cards, but that can usefully be distinguished. It was the Comte de Mellet who initiated this development by suggesting that ancient Egyptians had used the tarot for fortune telling and provides a method purportedly used in ancient Egypt. Following MCM, Etteilla brought the cartomantic tarot dramatically forward by inventing a method of cartomancy, assigning a divinatory meaning to each of the cards (both upright and reversed), publishing La Cartonomancie français (a book detailing the method), and creating the first tarot decks exclusively intended for cartomantic practice. Etteilla's original method was designed to work with a common pack of cards known as the piquet pack. It was not until 1783, two years after Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif that he turned his cartomantic expertise to the development of a cartomantic method using the standard (i.e. Marseilles) tarot deck. His expertise was formalized with the publication of the book Maniere de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots''A scanned version of the original text is available and the creation of a society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du liver de Thot. The society subsequently went on to publish ''Dictionnaire synonimique du Livere de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1980. pp. 110 Following Ettielle, tarot cartomancy was moved forward by Marie-Anne Adelaid Lenormand (1768-1830) and others. Lenormand was the most famous and was the first cartomancer to the stars, claiming to be the confidante of Empress Josephine and other local luminaries. She was so popular, and cartomancy with tarot became so well established in France following her work, that a special deck entitled the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand was released in her name two years after her death. This was followed by many other specially designed cartomantic tarot decks, mostly based on Ettielle's Egyptian symbolism, but some providing other (for example biblical or medieval) flavors as well. Tarot as a cartomantic and divinatory tool is well established and new books expounding the mystical utility of the cartomantic tarot are published all the time. Mysticism By the early 18th century Masonic writers and Protestant clerics had established the tarot trumps as authoritative sources of ancient hermetic wisdom and Christian gnosis, and as revelatory tools of divine cartomantic inspiration, but they did not stop there. In 1870 Jean-Baptiste Pitois (better known as Paul Christian) wrote a book entitled Historie de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et le peuples. In that book, Christian identifies the tarot trumps as representing the "principle scenes" of ancient Egyptian initiatory "tests".Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1980. Christian provides an extended analysis of ancient Egyptian initiation rites that involves Pyramids, 78 steps, and the initiatory revelation of secrets. Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett write: Christian attempts to give authority to his analysis by falsely attributing an account of ancient Egyptian initiation rites to Iamblichus, but it is clear that if there is any initiatory relevance to the tarot trumps it is Christian who is the source of that information. Nevertheless, Christian's fabricated history of tarot initiation are quickly reinforced with the formation of an occult journal in 1889 entitled L'Initiation, the publication of an essay by Oswald Wirth in Papus's book Le Tarot des Bohémiens that states that the tarot is nothing less than the sacred book of occult initiation, the publication of book by François-Charles Barlet entitled, not surprisingly, L'Initiation, and the publication of Le Tarot des Bohémians by Dr. Papus (a.k.a. Dr. Gérard Encausse). Subsequent to this activity the initiatory relevance of the tarot was firmly established in the minds of occult practitioners. The emergence of the tarot as an initiatory masterpiece was coincident with, and fit perfectly into, the flowering of initiatory esoteric orders and secret brotherhoods during the middle of the 19th century. For example, Marquis Stanislas de Guaita (1861–1897) founded the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross in 1888 along with several key commentators on the initiatory tarot (e.g. Dr Papus, François-Charles Barlet, and Joséphin Péladin). These orders placed great emphasis on secrets, advancing through the grades, and initiatory tests and so it is not surprising that, already having the tarot to hand, they read into the tarot initiatory significance. Doing so not only lent an air of divine, mystical, and ancient authority to their practices but allowed them to continue to expound on the magical, mystical, significance of the presumably ancient and hermetic tarot.Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth, 1980. pp. 127 Be that as it may the activity established the tarot's significance as a device and book of initiation not only in the minds of occult practitioners, but also (as we will see below) in the minds of new age practitioners, Jungian psychologists, and general academics. Current context The history of the tarot and the tarot arcana is the history of Western esotericists and freemasons writing hermetic, cartomantic, cabbalistic, and gnostic significance onto a thing that was originally nothing but a game of cards. The standard skeptical approach dismisses tarot as a self-delusional failure, as Michael Dummett does. While no historical evidence may be invoked to justify any of the esotericists' claims made for tarot during the course of its 200-year evolution, the notion that the tarot has occult, mystical, cartomantic, and magical significance has persisted to the present day, where it enjoys a certain degree of popularity and acceptance among believers.For example Rachel Pollack, Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot. 1980 Wellingborough: Aquarian Press. Such believers say the tarot is variously a tool for therapy, something that can facilitate the process of "individuation",Gad, I. 1994. Tarot and individuation: Correspondences with cabala and alchemy. York Beach, ME: Nicholas-Hays. an instrument capable of "healthe human psyche and liftthe human spirit",Semetsky, Inna (2010a). When Cathy was a Little Girl: The Healing Praxis of Tarot Image. International Journal of Children's Spirituality. 15(1): 59-72. even offering transcendence, transformation,Bala, Michael (2010): The Clown, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 4:1, 50-71. and self-awareness. Among the more sophisticated apologists for tarot, the claimed understandings are sometimes connected to Jung's equivocal statement about tarot: "If one wants to form a picture of the symbolic process, the series of pictures found in alchemy are good examples.... It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation."C. J. Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton N.J. Princeton University Press. Vol. 9:1, para 81. 1981. In modern culture, the deck is used in many ways. The boss characters in the video game series The House of the Dead are named after individual cards in the sequence. The Tarot deck is also used in modern computer game series Shin Megami Tensei, and spin-off Persona series. The games use the major arcana to sort different mythical beings into categories, and also have in world characters represent specific cards. Persona 5 for example has a character represent of the Major arcana in game, with the exception of The World And, going further, Persona 3 uses the minor arcana suits of swords, batons/wands, coins and cups to represent the likelihood of a weapon, money, health or experience points being dropped after battle. These are some of its many references to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, specifically the third part, Stardust Crusaders, that used the arcana for the first 21 Stands, and the final stand, The World. There is also the Arcana Force Deck archetype from Yu-Gi-Oh! that offers a massive advantage to the player if they can get the correct coin toss results. See also *Minor Arcana *Tarot de Maléfices Notes External links Major Category:Tutelary deities Category:Cartomancy *